1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains generally to the field of cloud computing. More particularly, the invention pertains to systems and methods for managing cloud infrastructure and communicating with cloud provisioning and management tools.
2. Technical Background
Companies have begun offering businesses a new cloud computing outsourcing option that promises reduced costs, improved availability, improved scalability, and reduced time to deploy new applications. These companies act as managed service providers that rent virtual computer, storage, and Internet connectivity services for variable periods on a pay-per-use basis from large pools of repurposable, multi-tenant computing resources. Such cloud infrastructure providers include Amazon Web Services, Joyent, and Mosso.
Many businesses, however, are currently unable to use cloud infrastructure because of a lack of security, control, and manageability of the computing capacity rented from the cloud infrastructure providers. These problems prevent such businesses from maximizing their use of cloud infrastructure, which includes virtual server instances, storage, and Internet bandwidth. In particular, many enterprise IP networks deploy a protective control layer or “enterprise network membrane” to repel external threats, detect intrusions, authorize access, govern and audit activity, and ensure manageability. Unless the business has an administrator or other agent working with the cloud infrastructure provider, the enterprise network membrane does not extend to the cloud infrastructure.
It thus should be appreciated from the foregoing description that there is a need for an improved system and method for managing cloud infrastructure and communicating with cloud provisioning and management tools that addresses the difficulties described above. The present invention satisfies this need and provides further related advantages.